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Speaker Linda Reid defends legislature spending

Speaker Linda Reid in the house at the B.C. legislature in Victoria, B.C. December 11, 2013.

Photograph by: DARREN STONE
, TIMES COLONIST

VICTORIA — Speaker of the Legislature Linda Reid defended her spending on Wednesday, saying that $48,000 for a customized computer terminal helps her communicate with three B.C. Liberal MLAs in wheelchairs.

In her first statement about her spending controversy, Reid said the touch-screen “speaker’s console”, with ornate wood panelling, allows MLAs in wheelchairs to electronically “illuminate their intention to speak” in front of her.

Reid also said the computer allows “for enhanced communication” with the Clerk’s table, located less than five feet in front of her, and lets the Speaker view proceedings in other committee rooms at the legislature — even though those rooms also have designated Speakers and chairpersons already monitoring proceedings.

The legislature has an electronic light system for MLAs to signal their intention to speak, but Reid’s statement made no mention of why it was deficient and had to be replaced by a more costly system.

Reid continued to refuse interviews Wednesday.

“As Speaker, I take full responsibility for these expenditures,” she said in her statement. She also pledged to make recommendations “to bring greater oversight, rigour and transparency” to the building’s finances at a meeting next week.

The statement was Reid’s first public reaction to a Vancouver Sun story this week that detailed numerous spending projects at the legislature during a time of fiscal austerity for government ministries, programs and services.

Reid spent $13,965 to replace the curtains in the legislature library. “The drapes in the dining room were last replaced in 1996,” Reid argued in her statement.

She spent $6,377 for new drapes and chair reupholstering in her personal office, arguing it hadn’t been upgraded since 2000, and refinishing the furniture preserved them as “historic assets.”

Reid said a new MLA TV lounge in the legislature library is accessible to MLAs in wheelchairs, whereas the previous lounge on the library’s top floor could not be reached.

But her statement offered no explanation as to why the lounge was stacked with free muffins, snacks and coffee for MLAs, nor why she spent $733 on a food display rack, $5,387 on flat-screen televisions, or $3,675 on a new countertop.

Reid’s statement also ignored the issue of hiring her Liberal re-election campaign manager, who lives in Richmond, to a job in her Victoria Speaker’s office.

That job requires taxpayers to pay the travel, hotel and meal bills for an out-of-town employee to repeatedly commute into the capital, while other employees in the Speaker’s office are based in Victoria.

Liberal and NDP house leaders have called on Reid to explain the expenditures at a meeting of the Legislative Assembly Management Committee next Tuesday.

Both sides have offered support for expenses that increase wheelchair accessibility in the legislature, but said other questions, including the hiring of Reid’s campaign manager, are legitimate concerns.

Both sides have also praised Reid for being more open than previous Speakers, which is largely the result of scathing 2012 review by B.C.’s Auditor General, after which politicians pledged to reform the secretive spending practices of the assembly.

Reid took the Speaker’s office last July, several months after MLAs were already implementing their financial reforms.

Premier Christy Clark echoed her Liberal colleagues on the controversy Wednesday, saying Reid is at least moving in the right direction by providing some figures.

“I think all of us who spend the public’s money have to be accountable for that,” said Clark. “We have to make sure the public knows how and where we are spending it…

“I don’t know any more about how she spent, and what she spent, than you do. But it sounds like she’s open to more oversight, and she’s certainly open to more transparency as she’s demonstrated. That’s the right direction to go in.”

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